Iowa & Missouri Map 1884 Township Print - Des Moines, Dubuque, St. Louis, Jefferson City

Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr., working through Wm. M. Bradley & Bro. of Philadelphia, issued this Iowa and Missouri sheet in 1884, part of his New General Atlas published in 1886. This printing is hand-colored, combining both states on a single sheet at a genuine county-and-township scale, tracking two Missouri Valley states whose agricultural economy had, by the 1880s, matured well past their frontier decades. The sheet maps Iowa and Missouri jointly, showing settlements, rivers, and railroads across a shared Mississippi and Missouri River geography.

County and township boundaries are laid out in fine detail across both states, a granular administrative view spanning from Iowa's northern prairie counties down through Missouri's own diverse geography. The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers bound and cross the sheet, the two waterways that had shaped settlement and trade across both states since their earliest years. Railroads thread through both states in a dense network, connecting the region's farm counties to river ports and eastern markets. Together the counties, the rivers, and the railroads sketch two states whose settled, subdivided landscape had, by 1884, little open prairie left to survey.

For an Iowa or Missouri family with late-19th-century roots, or a collector building out the two states' maps across the decades, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries Iowa and Missouri separately from Cram's 1893 and 1883 editions and Asher & Adams' 1874 atlas, Iowa combined with Wisconsin in Bradford's 1838 atlas, and Iowa alone in Tanner's earlier 1842 sheet; this 1884 Mitchell sheet is the only one in the store to pair Iowa and Missouri together on a single map. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.